If looking for improvements a nice warning stating “you didn’t triangulate your model” - maybe followed by “Num3nut5” and the option to “continue importing anyway or abort” - before the engine importer starts doing all of the triangulation work for you would be very much an improvement…
You know, considering that when you forget to triangulate on a model with a billion or so faces the engine will lock you out for a significant amount of time to run what will surely end up being a wrong triangulation.
Similarly it would be nice to get prompts you can mute for things that may affect people’s workflow
-lightmap UVs not present? Continue or abort?
-collision import is ticked but no hulls found. Continue or abort?
Etc.
I got the same issue , I use 5.5 import fbx never got issues, but i don’t know what happend or I click somewhere wrong… but the new Import Fbx option is not the same as before and got error no smooting group , also the mesh look ugly . ( I import in other project 5.5 is just normal ) .
I am also having difficulties with the new import system in 5.5.
I have models that I purchased online for 3ds max, and converted to be used in UE, usually when I do this, I only plug materials into the existing slots in max, and when I import them to UE no matter how many ID slots the model has, UE recognizes the materials I have and only makes slots for those materials.
In my specific case I have fitness equipment that has 108 slots in max, but the 108 slots only actually use 5 materials (don’t @ me, I didn’t model it). Now, when I import this into 5.3 it comes in with just 5 slots for materials, as expected. In 5.5 however it creates a slot for every ID that the multi material in max has (108). I’ve been losing my mind today, thinking I did something different in my workflow, but then I checked 5.3 and everything worked as it always does. Please help, I can’t disable the interchange framework because I need it for other assets in the scene that I use datasmith for. What do I need to do that Unreal stops creating all those material slots??
My hotfix workaround is to import them in 5.3 and then migrate them, but that can’t be a long term solution.
every time i sit down to do some work in unreal i find that they’ve changed some core part of my workflow and i spend hours getting more and more frustrated.
atp im just gonna switch over to unity or godot. it’s completely pointless learning to do anything in unreal if they’re just constantly changing things. every time i feel like i’ve got a good handle on what im doing they change it up. it’s maddening.
In 5.1 this works, but in 5.5.1 it doesn’t import the texture for some reason. I’m not sure if I need to tweak the import settings. I’m new to UE so I’m not even sure what I’d be looking for.
Let me know if you need anymore information and I can be your guinea pig with this issue.
With Unreal 5.5.2 now released, it seems Interchange still doesn’t handle overridden legacy import options via python.
For example I’ve taken over development of Epic’s BlenderTools (Send to Unreal and UE to Rigify) which has the ability to override the import options. Here I’ve set it to override vertex colours with a purple colour
hi, I had the same import issue, If you can import it into blender, maya or 3dsmax and export to fbx again, would it work.? because I had the same import screen when I imported an obj file instead of an fbx.
This is very frustrating. The “Preserve Local Transform” option is missing from the new importer. Our character animation jitter at the feet without it. I tried importing with 4.27 and 5.1 and the animation looks correct with Preserve Local Transform. Disabling the Interchange plugins in 5.5 will fallback to the old importer with the Preserve option showing, but it also disables Mesh Painting which we use… Why is there such a dependency? Please fix this.
It’s the nature of software development, Sloane. Epic isn’t setting out to break people’s workflows, but inevitably to improve shortcomings in a design, you often end up having to build a new design. The legacy FBX importer had a lot of flaws for certain workflows that I am sure Epic was trying to fix with the redesign, but any time you redesign things you risk making some workflows break. It can be frustrating in the short term, but in the long term the product will be better for it.
You’re not alone for feeling frustrated right now. For example, I like that there are many more options for doing the import in 5.5 and I like that it’s done async with a progress report in the bottom right corner of the screen, but I don’t like that the way meshes get combined and/or named is very different in this workflow than it was in 5.4.
It may feel like Epic isn’t realizing that the changes break your workflow, but that’s likely not true – it’s more likely that the meshes Epic is using for testing don’t have the same edge cases/requirements as the meshes you have; the meshes you are using require the FBX importer to be more flexible/handle more cases than they anticipated in the new design. There’s nothing wrong with your meshes, I just mean that when reimplementing the importer, Epic had to relearn how the old process worked to implement a new one, and they might not have recognized all the edge cases the old one handled that are present in meshes like you have.
I’d say the most optimal result for everyone isn’t to hate on the new workflow or to ask Epic to back it out, but instead to provide feedback on the parts that aren’t working for your workflow. The more specific, the better, so they can incorporate that feedback into an even better design – best of both worlds.
